LinkPatrol

As a web marketer, we tend to start work on a page after it is complete. It stands to reason, right? You don’t need web marketing until after there is a website, otherwise what is there to market? While this may sound logical, when it comes to building a website that can be properly marketed it should start before the business is even named. Website marketing actually starts before you even choose your domain name. Mastering domain name and URL structure sets you up for success!

Choosing a domain name and making your URL’s search engine friendly will save you so much trouble in the long run. Getting out ahead of these issues can save you hundreds, if not thousands of dollars of development, not to mention the headache of fighting the search engines while making necessary changes.

There are several key areas regarding domain name and URL structure that business owners will be wise to pay attention to while having a new website developed.

Choosing Your Domain Name

If you’re just starting a new business, before you even select your new business name, you first want to make sure the domain name is available. Unfortunately, this may mean having a few (or perhaps hundreds of) backup name options in case the URL for the name you want isn’t available.

There are things to pay attention to when you are choosing the URL for your website.

Don’t use hyphens

Don’t build a site on a platform that controls the domain name (get your own)

Once you’ve secured your domain name, it’s a good idea to secure some alternate versions. This helps protect your brand. The last thing you want is some other company purchasing a domain name similar to yours as a means to capitalize off the brand equity you’ve spent years building.

Here are some alternate domain options to consider:

Abbreviated versions: Think of ways to abbreviate your domain name and secure those domain names. Shorten words into a few letters, use the domain name initials, or a combo of both. (i.e. BFM.com, BisB.com, etc.).

Hyphenated versions: For ultimate brand protection, you can buy domain names with a hyphen between the words. Many businesses have similar (or the same) name and if the hyphenated version is available, they’ll buy it. This creates direct competition to your brand.

Alternate & Misspellings: An interesting thing about my company is that no matter how many times we tell people, they still get the name wrong. We’re called Pole Marketing, Pole Positioning, and even Pole Positioning Marketing, and that doesn’t even touch the alternate ways to spell “pole” (pull, pul, pool). Grabbing alternate name spellings and even misspellings can not only help you hold on to your brand name, but also capture traffic from those who type your domain name incorrectly, which happens a lot.

Brand Names: If you sell a product with brand names, then it can be wise to buy up product/brand domain names. This is especially true if you’re building your own product brand name. As these become household names, you want to be sure to capture traffic from people looking for that.

Alternate TLD: There are a lot of TLD’s available (top level domain; i.e. .com, .net, .org, etc.). Buying them all up for your domain can be cumbersome and expensive, but there are some cases where you might want to secure these, especially if you do business in other countries. Buying up these TLD’s before someone else does can ensure you own your brand in that country.

Once you have all these domain names secured, you’ll want to implement a 301 redirect for each. This redirect will take your visitors from the alternate domain to your main site. Getting this redirect right is important. Other methods of redirecting, such as domain parking, 302 redirect, etc., can be lead to some potentially serious problems later.

Fix Canonical Issues

Every website comes pre-built with duplicate content. I addressed these issues in detail in The Complete Guide to Mastering Duplicate Content Issues. Without getting into too much duplication here (yes, that pun was intended), I’ll briefly discuss one of the universal duplicate content issues.

Every website home page can be accessed by six different URLs:

www.site.com

site.com

www.site.com/

site.com/

www.site.com/index.html (or .php, .asp, etc.)

site.com/index.html (or .php, .asp, etc.)

While each of these URL’s will get the visitor to the same information, each URL can be indexed separately causing duplicate content in the search index. Eventually the search engines get around to figuring out that these are not duplicate pages, but until then you’re basically working against yourself. Even once they do, there is no guarantee that you’ll get 100% of all link value associated with any of these versions.

Using server side redirects is the best solution to ensure that whenever any of these URL’s are entered, they all lead back to the one you chose. Talk to your web host to find the best server side solution for these redirects. The next best solution is to add a canonical tag to your home page code. It looks like this:

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.site.com”/>

This tag tells the search engines that www.site.com is the correct version for their index and link metrics.

Keeping Your Home Page at the Root Level

Many websites are built with the home page somewhere other than at the root level. An example of this is a site called YourMusic.com. When you typed in www.yourmusic.com you were redirected to www.yourmusic.com/home/.

By having this improper URL structure, they were setting themselves up for disaster if and when they ever changed the URL for the home page. While the redirect from yourmusic.com was redirecting properly, any change would have forced an additional redirect from yourmusic.com/home to its new location. This can cause a host of issues, not the least of which are lost rankings and loss of link value through any new redirect.

Be sure to keep your home page accessible at the root level and redirect all visitors to that URL. Always.

Building Search Engine Friendly URL’s

With your URL and domain names secure, it’s time to focus on the URL’s of pages other than your home page. Many systems use long and complicated URL structures that you couldn’t type correctly if it was being dictated to you letter for letter. This isn’t what you want. The best URL’s use a combination of keywords, good structure, and brevity.

URL’s should be structured similarly to how visitors navigate your site. If your site is divided into several categories and sub-categories, then these should be used as URL folders and sub-folders. For example:

www.site.com/category/sub-category/page-name.html

Using categories in your URL structure helps you utilize keywords in your URL, which is valuable to your search optimization efforts. It also gives the visitor context to what the page might be about before they even visit.

www.site.com/perfume/chanel/allure.html

In the example above, you know that “Allure” refers to the name of a perfume by Chanel. Clearly this page is all about the Chanel perfume Allure. These are great visual cues to web searchers when they are scrolling through search results looking for a page that is most relevant to their search query.

Hyphens, Not Underscores in URL’s

When creating URL’s with multiple words, it’s best to use hyphens rather than underscores. For the most part, search engines treat them the same however, there have been some issues with them in the past. From a usability perspective, underscores can be hard to differentiate from spaces.

If a URL is presented as a link, then you want the viewer to know exactly how to type that URL into the browser bar. Any miscommunication here can lead the visitor to a different website.

Establish a Proper URL Hierarchy

Over all, you want to have a strong URL hierarchy that isn’t too shallow or too deep. Like Goldilocks, you want it to be “just right.”

Flat URL Hierarchy

If your hierarchy is too flat, then you run the risk of having all the pages being deemed as equal. We often set up our navigation to draw our visitors through categories and sub-categories, and we should set up our URL’s in much the same fashion. When “every” page of your site is essentially on the same level, the search engines have difficulty telling which pages should be grouped together topically and how to give proper weight to pages that are higher up navigationally.

Deep URL Hierarchy

The opposite of a flat hierarchy is one that is too deep. Instead of causing pages to appear to be of the same value, a deep architecture causes pages to have a far lesser value than they need in order to perform well in search engine rankings. A deep architecture devalues the pages at the bottom to the point of being considered almost worthless to the search engine.

Perfect URL Hierarchy

The perfect URL hierarchy is one that isn’t too shallow nor too deep. It’s “just right.” You want each page on your site to be found within just three or four clicks. There are exceptions to this, depending on the size of the site, but most sites can be structured so each page isn’t too far from the home page. This is both in terms of clicks and the directories in the URL itself. Using proper URL directories allows you to get your keywords in place in the URL and keep a relatively shallow URL structure.

Putting all these URL tips into practice will give you an effective search engine friendly architectural structure that also helps your visitors navigate, find, and understand your site.

Very well said. Picking a domain name is a tricky task. Making a proper URL structure would be easy if you can write it on excel sheet first and then implement the same by your developer. Developers mess up if you don’t give them right direction

So true. All the great marketers out there have domain names that are simple and easy to remember. Great that you’ve listed the don’t’s when deciding what you want for your domain name. This definitely is a complete guide! Thanks!

A great guide! Thanks! Just one comment about the section ‘Building Search Engine Friendly URL’s’. I do agree with URL structure: http://www.site.com/category/sub-category/page-name.html however on e-commerce sites (or similar) this could sometimes generate a very long URL, especially when you have a long product name and category and subcategory names could be 2 words each. In this case I think it’s better to leave out category and sub category in URL and only have a product name in URL – especially if the domain name is already quite long.

Great list and recommendations. I see so many new bloggers and site owners that pick domain names that are just a bad idea. I always remind people to think about their domain name and if they were going to advertise on the radio, how many people would be able to remember it, spell it and know what it is without a sales pitch!